When you first begin your affiliate marketing blog, you might be overwhelmed with the amount of writing you’re doing with the hopes of being ranked organically by Google.
If you’re taking your website seriously, you likely have at least a dozen pending long tail keywords to target, and writing takes a lot of time.
Don’t let anyone tell you that affiliate marketing is easy. Creating online income isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme. It’s a business that you put in countless hours into and don’t get to reap the rewards right away.
But if you want to offset some of that writing burden, you might be tempted to hire someone to help you churn out some of that material.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with finding a writer to relieve some of that bottleneck that comes when creating content.
But if you’re hoping to spend very little money and expect high quality results, you’ll likely be sadly mistaken.
CASE STUDY #1 – A SUPPLEMENT WEBSITE
My first full-time affiliate marketing blog is geared toward supplements. My strategy was (and still is) to target long tail keywords organically via reviews and comparisons, things like that to drive traffic to a purchase site, usually Amazon.
In the beginning, I wrote all of my own content. But I got burned out pretty quickly. The topics were interesting, but tedious. So once I heard that outsourcing my writing was a possibility, I explored this route.
Unfortunately, “this route” was during a point in my life when I was on a budget, so even though I was willing to spend a little cash, my little bit of cash didn’t stretch very far in terms of quality.
I think I was paying around $5 for 500 words. That comes out to a penny a word. What kind of quality do you think you’ll receive at 1 cent per word?
It took a few $5 articles to realize that maybe I was being cheap and only attracting low quality writers.
$5 on Fiverr is usually going to get you a writer from a country where English is not their native language.
This means that you’ll either spend a lot of time editing and rewriting OR you’re going to be even more lazy and slap up the article as is.
That’s where the mistake is.
I did this. A lot. Too often. I underestimated the worth of a well-written article because I was too focused on the keyword getting them in the door. I didn’t understand how the article was written would affect my conversion rate.
So for a while, I was able to get some good traffic, but my conversion rate was hindered by a sloppy article that didn’t make much sense.
The good thing is, you’re always able to go back and optimize old posts once you see how Google is ranking your article.
If you’re tracking keywords, either manually or using software, you can optimize your posts headings, meta titles and description, images, and obviously your article to encourage a higher clickthrough to your website and possibly an affiliate sale, which is the goal of your site.
On the flip side, you need to know your budget for writing, especially if you’re targeting low volume or low value keywords. It doesn’t make sense to pay 5 cents a word for an article that may take years to recoup the investment.
Focusing on niche keywords is obviously king to organic traffic, but when you’re paying for someone else’s talent, leave them the keywords that are most likely to convert to higher paying commissions.
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